Thank you for submitting your Stage 2 manuscript. Neither of the two reviewers who evaluated your Stage 1 submission was available, but rather than immediately inviting new reviewers we decided to perform an evaluation among the Managing Board to determine whether further specialist review would be required. Happily, we felt that your submission was reported very clearly and in-line with protocol; the results distinguish the outcomes of confirmatory and exploratory tests, and the discussion is sensible and evidence-based. With the Stage 2 criteria so close to being satisfied, we have decided that further in-depth evaluation by field experts is not required to proceed.

I enclose below comments from another member of the Managing Board. In addition, I think a nice addition to your paper to help readers quickly digest the conclusions would be an additional row in your research plan reporting in simple terms the outcome, i.e. whether each hypothesis was confirmed or disconfirmed (you could then rename the table to "Research plan and outcomes"). I will leave this as an option to consider (it is not mandatory). On a further minor note, there appears to be formatting issue with this table in which the Hypothesis row is duplicated at the top of each page -- is this intentional?

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Additional comments from Managing Board:

My evaluation of the manuscript finds it to be consistent with Stage 2 criteria and I could not see any deviations from the preregistered research plans. The authors have made their data and other research materials available on OSF (the link is functional). I list two points below that I hope will be helpful to the authors:

1. Under Methods > Participants, the authors describe exclusion criteria related to prior diagnoses and depression experience. It isn’t immediately clear to me whether these criteria were applied to the 201 participants remaining after filtering for incomplete questionnaires, described in the paragraph preceding the one I reference. I do see numbers adding up to 201 in Table 2, so unsure at what stage this filtering was implemented. Please ignore this if I misinterpreted the text or missed some crucial information on this elsewhere in the manuscript.

2. This sentence on Page 12 needs to be corrected, perhaps by removing the bolded text: “Rumination tendency was measured using the 22-item Rumination Responsiveness Scale will be used” (and please check thoroughly for any other similar typos which can easily creep into Stage 2 submissions due to tense changes).